As summer approaches and city temperatures mirror those around the globe and rise, the environmental works of local filmmakers hit the big screen as the Wild and Scenic Film Festival marks its fifth year.
The 2019 festival, held Saturday at Pittsburgh Playhouse’s PNC Theatre, Downtown, is the largest environmental film festival in the nation, touring in more than 150 cities. Sponsored by the Pennsylvania Resources Council and Allegheny CleanWays, it features eight national films and three films produced here: “Superfund: Tailing History,” “Downstream” and “Finding Our Power.”
Twelve producers behind “Superfund” are Point Park University students. Funded by a Heinz endowment, the filmmakers traveled to Montana to document the cleanup efforts of environmentalists working to rid the Upper Clark Fork River of toxic waste left behind from years of copper milling.
“Downstream” and “Finding Our Power” stay closer to home.
Christopher Rolinson and Gina Catanzarite spearheaded “Downstream.” Rolinson is a professor of photography, photojournalism and environmental journalism at Point Park, and Catanzarite teaches broadcast journalism there. Their film exposes threats to the watersheds in the area and examines how pollution upstream from abandoned mine drainage and poor sewage treatment affects the water and wildlife downstream.
“People are so used to seeing the rivers from the land,” Catanzarite says. “I wanted people to see the land from the rivers.”
“Access to clean, drinkable water, plain and simple, is a civil right,” Rolinson says.
The festival opens just months after NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies revealed that 2018 was the Earth’s fourth hottest year in its 140 years of record-keeping. This phenomenon, along with President Trump’s 2017 decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement aimed at slowing global climate change, inspired Kirsi Jansa’s “Finding Our Power.”
“[Climate change] is a crisis, and we don’t deal very well with crises,” Jansa, a longtime journalist and documentarian, says.
Her film takes a closer look at the Frick Environmental Center and its sustainability practices.
The last in a series of shorts titled “Sustainability Pioneers,” “Finding Our Power” encourages viewers to face the reality of a warming Earth and, by following the Frick Environmental Center’s lead, do something about it.
“It’s time for each one of us to be brave,” Jansa says.
Tickets are $25 (prc.org/filmfest/) for the Wild and Scenic Film Festival at Pittsburgh Playhouse’s PNC Theatre, 350 Forbes Ave., Downtown. Doors open at 6 p.m. and screening starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10 for the after party at Forbes Tavern immediately following.
Kaisha Jantsch: kjantsch@post-gazette.com.
First Published: May 30, 2019, 12:00 p.m.
